Just a note that Freebase is now open for reads - you can view the site, and use the API, without an account.
Here are a few links to topics in Freebase to get you started:
Yo La Tengo (band)
Jack Black (actor)
You still need an invite to edit, so send me a note or post a comment if you're interested.
I just arrived in Portland and am here for OSCON, representing Metaweb. I'm hoping to meet developers who are interested in Freebase, and have a few invites to hand out for people who would like to try our alpha release.
On the developer front, I hope to meet people who are interested in MJT, our open-source Javascript template library (takes JSON, returns nicely-formatted results), as well as anyone who would like to build Perl, PHP, or Ruby libraries on top of our API.
And of course, we're hiring.
Feel free to come up and say hi. I'll be at the Django Master Class monday afternoon.
Part two of my liveblogging from Powerset. They're talking about how they differ with respect to indexing. This helps them with both matching documents and ranking them.
In indexing, they parse each sentence on the page. For example:
'Sir Edward Heath died of pneumonia.'
Here's how they index this sentence.
- extract entities and semantic relationships.
- - expand to find similar entities and abstractions
-In this phase, they understand that:
1. Sir Edward was a UK prime minister - a politician
2. pneumonia is a disease
3. if you died from something, you were killed by it
This is a big change from the search we know (Google). It lets the user phrase their query in a lot of different ways. For instance, Powerset can answer the following:
- 'what killed edward heath'
- 'which prime minister died of pneumonia'
- 'what was sir edward heath killed by'
- 'what politician died from pneumonia'
- 'politician died from disease'
Powerset has so far indexed NY Times corpus, Wikipedia, and is working with Freebase.
Martin Heller has written a thoughtful technical review of Freebase and the Metaweb Query API in an article titled Freebase, the Semantic Web, and the Metaweb Query API on the Strategic Developer weblog at Infoworld. I recommend that any developer interested in the Metaweb read his review. And if you're really interested, I have three invitations to give away for our alpha test.
At Metaweb, we're making our API as open as possible - here's the documentation. The API allows programmers and web developers to query Freebase via MQL (mickle) the Metaweb Query Language. MQL is not your standard SQL "select user_name from users where ..." syntax because our database allows for a great deal of expressiveness and connections between objects with varying schemas.
If you want to ask questions and learn more, our dev team posts on the Freebase Dev Blog. For executive-level discussions about Freebase and the philosophy behind it, see Robert Cook's blog, Freebasics.
In addition to the API and MQL, we've also open-sourced (BSD dual-clause license) a web toolkit called MJT (midget). MJT is influenced by Kid and Genshi, and allows developers to query and display information with the rendering done in-browser. It's a nice way to create data-driven applications without a separate app server. Javascript has come a long way.
Here's a MJT documentation excerpt.
* * *
MJT Templates
Mjt is an HTML templating engine that runs entirely in a web browser. It was built for the Freebase service, but it can be used for many other web services. It is distributed as open source.
Mjt makes it very simple to take data from a web service and format it in a browser, with no server support. The templates are hosted and delivered as static HTML, and they are compiled and applied entirely in Javascript.
Mjt is particularly useful with services that return JSON values and accept a callback= parameter, such as the Freebase service and the Yahoo JSON API. With these services you can use mjt to build "mash-ups" that incorporate data from services on multiple hosts.For a step-by-step introduction to the mjt template language as well as an example of mjt in action, see the intro tour.There's one week left to snag an invitation to Metaweb's Freebase alpha test. I've got three invitations to give away. So if you're interested, post a comment here.
(full disclosure: I work for Metaweb)
I just got back from SXSW, and there was a really positive response to Freebase from the people I met.
I think that our decision to make Freebase data available via the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-by) license is a big part of the positive reaction -- people are willing to share when they know that the sharing goes both ways.
Freebase invite contest
Now I'm looking for people who have data to share and would like to try out Freebase. So I'm holding a contest - if you want to use Freebase, post a comment and tell me why you are interested. The three best submissions between now and Friday, March 23 will get invites to our alpha test.
Whether you're a regular user, a programmer who wants to use an API, or have an interesting data set that you'd like to share with the world, you've got a chance.
